With much fanfare, the national ICT internship programme was launched under the patronage of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh in April last year. But since then not a single graduate has been trained through this programme.
The three-year internship programme, to be operationalised by the Ministry of Science and Information & Communication Technology, aims to the capacity building of ICT professionals and development of the software industry.
Despite having budgetary allocation, the ICT programme has failed to take off as the Finance Ministry is yet to disburse the required Tk 2.5 crore to run the project. As a result, thousands of ICT students graduating every year from the eight government and 52 private universities are facing difficulties in finding jobs because of lack of experience.
Both the Bangladesh Computer Council and the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Service (BASIS), the representative organisations for the government and the software companies respectively, have already expresses their concern over the situation. Jahidul Hasan Mitul, an official of BASIS has said, "If the funds were disbursed in time, at least 500 interns could gain real experience in IT field in the last six months”.
Source: The Daily Star.
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